Meet Tony Wu: The Wired Enigma Challenge winner

Tony Wu (@tonytlwu), 25, website designer and the winner of Wired's Enigma Challenge, has always liked puzzles. So when, as a Wired subscriber, he was one of the first to glimpse the competition, he dived straight in. And that started a month-long saga of hidden clues, strange word games, time-shifted snapshots of the British Empire and a fiendishly frustrating phoneline -- all of which led to a 32GB, 3G iPad.

Enigma Challenge launched in Wired's 07.10 issue, with questions and clues hidden around the magazine, but further teasers appeared online and on Twitter, which had payers scurrying around for the next big clues.

"The first few rounds were pretty straightforward," says Wu. "But then you find yourself on the leaderboards and the thing takes on a momentum of its own. I was having to keep an eye on my position. First I was at ten or nine, but then I would drop off and I would have to get back on track pretty quickly."

An early success was Wu's 3D shot of himself drinking tea (featured, coincidentally, in Wired's Rants page, 08.10) and that led to wider recognition.

"I had people getting in touch with me, who had seen my pic, and following me in Twitter," he says. "That was fun."

The hardest part of the competition, though, was the mystery phoneline.

"I got stuck on that for ages. Nothing I tried seemed to lead to a solution. I spent a whole day ringing the phoneline and trying to work it out. I hope it wasn't too expensive."

Paradoxically the answer lay in a little civil disobedience.

"There was a section of the phoneline that you were told not to go into as it was faulty; and another place where you were told not to dial 0. After a while, I just tried doing both those things and suddenly it worked. The lesson, I guess, is don't always be good."